Electrically powered boat anchor winches are a common labour saving device on pleasure craft. The simplest and cheapest form involves a winch with a single speed DC electric motor wired into a 12V or 24V battery for raising and lowering the anchor.
A disadvantage of this simple form is that it takes much longer to deploy the anchor than with a manual winch, as the safe speed for raising the anchor is much slower than the safe speed for lowering the anchor.
A solution known in the art is to incorporate a clutch release mechanism, whereby the motor can be disengaged and anchor can be allowed to drop to the ocean floor unhindered by the motor speed. Such mechanisms add considerable cost and complexity and can be unreliable.
Variable or multiple speed electric winches are known, but prior art variable speed winches either utilize complex gears or operate only to variably reduce the voltage applied to the motor from the 12V battery. In such devices the variable speeds are typically used for the purpose of reduction of the maximum raising speed for certain tasks.
There is therefore a need for an improved approach to the provision of rapid anchor lowering in an electrically powered boat anchor winch.
The inventors have realized that a relatively inexpensive and highly reliable controller can be added to a simple one speed electric winch to provide reliable rapid anchor lowering.